A More Predictable, Secure, and Responsive Public Cloud

Managed Service for AWS

As the public cloud enters its second decade, its business promise is clear: an unparalleled ability to quickly flex compute resources as business needs change. But the public cloud comes with its share of risks, not so much in the platforms themselves, but in how we use them.

Regardless of your maturity with the public cloud, you’ve likely experienced some of the following:

Unforeseen expenses due to spikes in new resources deployed across your business

Security and configuration missteps that leave you exposed

A myriad of tools to sort through in order to maximize the impact of your investments

Lack of qualified or affordable public cloud talent

Your organization needs the innovation engine that the public cloud represents, but also the cockpit, controls and guidance systems to get you to your destination. That’s what AHEAD CoPilot provides.

Benchmarks to gauge how well you’re performing against best practice

Live dashboard and real-time alerts to help you quickly respond to anomalies

Customizable reporting

Solution Architecture

AHEAD has done the extensive research on the right tools for monitoring cloud billing, inventory, security, and compliance. We developed our own proprietary message bus to make sure what we’re monitoring can easily be integrated into Service Now for incident management. And we employ Slack for ChatOps support and access to AHEAD cloud experts. Access to all of this – reporting, monitoring, and incident management – is delivered through a single sign-on portal.

How much time and resource would you require to stitch this all together? Not just the technologies, but the reporting and benchmarks, and synthesis of all the data they provide.

This is exactly what we need to do with the best of breed tools. But we don't have the time or resource to constantly evaluate, configure, tune, or troubleshot them - let alone monitor all of the data they generate.

-CIO, Information Services Company

Enablement Hours

We’ve done the research and integration of the right tools and controls for your public cloud. Using enablement hours, we also help you operationalize those tools, process the data, and remediate issues. Beginning at 20 hours per month, but scaling much higher depending on your level of AWS spend, these hours are split across structured interactions and flexible use cases.

Structured Interactions

Weekly calls to interpret performance and suggest remediation

Monthly reviews to ensure that your environment is improving

Flex Enablement Hours

Assistance in defining and adhering to AWS best practices

Assistance with environmental changes and configurations

Some common examples of how CoPilot clients use flexible hours include:

CloudFormation template authoring

S3 lifecycle policy management

Dashboard customization

IAM policy development

Automation via Lambda

Config rule creation

Tagging

FAQ

What types of issues can CoPilot help resolve?

CoPilot provides an integrated toolset to monitor and report on inventory, billing, security and compliance for AWS. The service gives you access to AHEAD’s collective expertise and knowledge to remediate and improve your environment through AHEAD Enablement hours, designed time each month for CoPilot engineers to help your team.

How do I access the CoPilot service?

Access to reporting, monitoring, and incident management is available through the CoPilot single sign-on portal. You will be assigned credentials to access the CoPilot portal as part of the onboarding process.

How long does it take to be onboarded to CoPilot?

Initial onboarding generally takes only a couple of hours. AHEAD leverages AWS CloudFormation templates to streamline the onboarding process. Further customization of alerts, compliance bundles, and other metrics will occur over the first several weeks.

Do I retain ownership over my AWS account(s) and data?

Youretain ownership of the AWS account(s) and have full rights and privileges to control the environment. Access is maintained by your administrators.

Can the CoPilot team see my data?

You always retain the ability to control and audit who is accessing each AWS account. AHEAD operates under the principle of least privilege. If you grant AHEAD access to the environment, the CoPilot team uses cross-account IAM roles to access AWS resources as needed. Additionally, the CoPilot tooling does not make any automated modifications to your environment.

Can the CoPilot team help me with questions about AWS services or guidance around which applications to use?

Yes. The CoPilot team is available to provide guidance about services being used as well as improvements to your environment. CoPilot engineers have extensive experience using AWS services and assist you in creating a well-architected environment. Additionally, our team is able to provide education and advice about new services and how they can optimize your environment.

When is the CoPilot team available?

CoPilot engineers are available during business hours, Monday through Friday, 9:00AM – 5:00PM (Eastern), except holidays.

Does CoPilot manage my applications or provide development support for my workloads?

CoPilot focuses on helping you optimize, secure, and gain insight into your AWS infrastructure. Your team will be responsible for managing any application-level requirements for the workloads.

Does CoPilot for AWS include Consolidated Billing?

Yes. AHEAD provides Consolidated Billing as part of CoPilot for AWS. You will receive one bill for CoPilot inclusive of AWS charges across all linked AWS accounts. AHEAD does not mark-up AWS charges — you pay the rates that are published on the AWS website for your usage. Our clients find that receiving an invoice from AHEAD for all accounts streamlines billing when multiple stakeholders deploy services on AWS.

Does AHEAD provide any chargeback for specific departments or applications?

Yes. AHEAD can provide custom chargeback/showback reporting to meet your needs in addition to budgets and billing alerts based on tags and applications.

Partners

We Can Quickly Assess the Security, Inventory, and Costs of Your Public Cloud